It has been a long road since I started senseshaper.com after I lost my mind and tried to rebuild it through these pages. In 2011, I abandoned my PhD at the University of Virginia when I had a manic crisis that disintegrated my academic career, deluded my mind and senses, and led to a loss of self.
I recovered, to an extent, through shaping sense in these pages and shaping wood into the art of the woodcut, with assistance from the pharmakon, Platonic and pharmaceutical, enough to get my master’s from UVA in 2015.
I got a new job and started a ten-year career.
I left that job in 2026.
And I return, like a prodigal son, to the scholarship of a failed academic and art, fortified this time by ten years of working life and a new medication.
I may be a failed academic and flailing artist, but it’s time to shape a new self. A better self. By shaping sense out of my life experiences, my [treated] disease, and my love of learning, through words, wood, and family.
This is the return of the repressed from the fields of the Lacanian Real.
Here endeth the account of Zachary Fisher, the Senſeſhaper, who loſt his mind in 2011 and has been ſhaping it again ever ſince, in words and in wood. Set forth at shapingwoodcuts.com in October, 2026.
Here beginneth a guide to theſe prints: how they are numbered, gloſſed, ſourced and cited, and where the old woodcuts that ſhaped them are kept; made at his requeſt by Claude, an artificial intelligence of Anthropic’s making, and ſet down the ninth day of October, 2026.
How to Use This Site
Shaping Woodcuts is the picture book of Shaping Sense: every print here was drawn, carved into a block, inked and pulled by hand. The site is laid out like a printer’s catalogue, so a few things work differently from a shop or a gallery.
Cuts and series
Each print is a cut, the early printers’ word for a woodcut, and each has a number in Roman numerals (Cut XLII). Prints shows them all, grouped by series: The Tudors, Philosophers, Pop Cuts, The States and the rest. Every cut has its own page, with the print set large on the page and “View full size” for a closer look at the cutting.
The record
Under each cut is its catalogue record: when it was cut, the block it was carved on, the paper and ink of the edition, its series, and the essay on senseshaper.com where it first appeared. Many cuts also show other states of the block, the earlier or later pulls where a line was recut or the inking changed.
Glosses, numbers and sources
The notes in the margins are glosses, as in a sixteenth-century book, beside the cut itself and beside the commentary below it. The ☞ pointing hand marks something worth noticing. Paragraphs of commentary carry permanent numbers (42.1), and pictures their own (fig. 42.1), so any part of a page can be cited exactly. Sources Shaped names what each cut is after: the painting, engraving or photograph behind the image, and the joke, song, film or text it plays on.
The Cabinet
The Cabinet holds the originals: woodcuts and engravings gathered from early books, and the portraits and prints the cuts were made after, each linked back to the library, museum or archive that keeps it. Browse them by century. A Cabinet entry ends with “Cite the original,” because the work is its maker’s, not this press’s.
Used, stolen and questionable
Prints travel. Each cut page keeps a record of where it has turned up. Cuts used lists places that reproduced it with credit. Cuts stolen lists copies with no credit at all. Questionable Shaping lists later shirts, stickers and prints that echo a cut’s joke or design, each with the cut’s date and theirs, so you can judge for yourself. An echo alone is not a claim of copying.
The end of a cut
Each page closes as early books did: a colophon set in a narrowing triangle that says what the cut is, who cut and pulled it, and when it was first set forth; the press’s device, the two faces; and a “Cite as” for the print as a work of art.
The Process and Consume
The Process follows one block from drawing to carving to print. Consume is the shop: hand-pulled prints from the Etsy store, and the designs on shirts, mugs and tiles. The essays that started it all are a click away under The Essays.
Woodcuts and images not attributed to others are © Zachary Fisher, all rights reserved. The Cabinet’s originals belong to their makers and keepers.